Last night — Thursday night — the breeze swung around sometime after midnight to start blowing from the north, bringing with it the first truly cool air of the season. Oh, we've had a few refreshing gusts, as storms swirled out in the gulf or rode up the east coast of the state. But this wasn't a storm wind, this was a fall wind, crisp and brisk, the kind that brings thoughts of winter instead of that nervy, dropping-barometer charge.
As I stood out by the New World Brewery's wrought-iron gates, waiting for a cab that wasn't ever going to come, the skin of my bare arms pebbled with goosebumps. It wasn't just the unexpected but welcome cold that did it, though. I thought I could hear something in that wind. Well, maybe not hear, exactly, but I could feel it, just below the abilities of my music-ruined ears, the way you can hear a helicopter before you really hear it. It was an odd, ominous jangle of various intertwined vibrations, carried on moving air that for all I know could've hugged the eastern seaboard all the way down from Connecticut, or beyond.
The sound of RV generators chugging.
The sound of zippers being zipped on decades-old luggage.
The sound of the huge block engines in oversized Cadillacs and Town Cars turning over, reluctantly, somewhere very cold.
The sound of airplanes taxiing.
My body recognized its significance first, pimpling in instinctive fear reaction, but my brain wasn't far behind.
Autumn is here.
And the snowbirds are coming.
All of a sudden, I knew it, with certainty, like knowing gravity will keep me from flying up into the sky if I go outside, like the salmon knows one day that it's the day to start swimming 500 miles to get laid. I just sensed it, with the sense that all longtime Florida residents have developed, to one degree or another. I'm sure we all felt it, on some level. I'm sure the manager of some Piccadilly Cafeteria in Tampa woke up Friday morning with something in the back of his mind suggesting he add more liver and onions to next week's food order.
I'm sure some guy who barely breaks even running a little antique shop on Central Avenue in downtown St. Pete unlocked the door to his business feeling like he might turn a profit sometime during the next month or so. I'm sure 12-year-old Billy So-and-So up in Palm Harbor idly started making a little anticipatory space in that top dresser drawer reserved for all the corny crap his Great Aunt Amelia is always bringing him when she comes down from Rochester to visit.
If you grew up here, or have lived here for more than, say, a decade, go outside late tonight when it gets quiet. Close your eyes, and lift your face to the breeze. You'll feel it. You might get an image in your mind's eye of a couple in their late 50s arguing about how many Speedos the husband really needs for a month on Siesta Key, or maybe just the barest whiff of Old Spice mixed with Ben Gay. But you'll get something. And you'll know.
Halloween isn't the only frightening annual occurrence that's just around the corner.
Some of us will make a note of it, and go on about our lives as usual. Some of us, especially those of us whose businesses enjoy a dramatic upswing during snowbird season, will actively begin preparations. And some of us will forget, particularly if it doesn't cool off or, God forbid, if it heats up again. It'll slip our minds, for a week or three. We won't even think about it again.
Until we're in line at a restaurant and we overhear someone ordering a grinder instead of a sub, or a pop instead of a soda.
Until a particularly sunny day inspires us to head out to Fort DeSoto, and we run into complete gridlock before we've even reached the toll booth on the Pinellas Bayway.
Until we're strolling along Clearwater Beach at sunset, and we realize that everyone around us is wearing sandals and black socks, and they're picking up shells off the sand and keeping them.
And suddenly, the memory of that night when we knew without question what was coming will come flooding back.
But by then, it will be too late.
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.